Working from a studio in a dimly lit basement in a Southeast DC home, Sarah Geary and Harley Adsit make the podcast Crime in Congress. And yes, there’s a gavel involved.
Geary, a media manager at Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and Adsit, a staffer for US Representative Earl L. “Buddy” Carter of Georgia, met on a work trip to Charleston, South Carolina, this past February. The pair discussed politics while grabbing a drink after work and discovered a shared interest in murder, political scandals, congressional crime. Naturally, they soon explored how they might tie those subjects together.
Within a month, Adsit and Geary released the first episode of Crime in Congress, about the 2001 murder of Chandra Levy. Like all episodes since, it began and ended with the bang of a gavel. (The show’s logo features a bloody gavel, and Adsit and Geary had an actual gavel made.) Since then, they’ve covered the 1977 Knoxville torso murder and produced a four-part series about Watergate—their only requirement is that the subject at hand can be tied to the US Capitol somehow.
Sometimes the show demonstrates how history can repeat, like the 1900 case in which Kentucky Governor William Goebel was shot and killed over an election that people on both sides thought was fraudulent. “One of the outcries the protestors had was ‘stop the steal,’ ” Geary says.
One of Adsit’s favorite episodes explores the murder of US District Attorney Philip Barton Key by Congressman Daniel Sickles, in 1859. Key had had an affair with Sickles’s wife and was later acquitted. “There existed the ‘unwritten law’ that said that if you sleep with someone’s wife, you get what’s coming to you,” Adsit says. Geary’s favorite episode is upcoming, about Mary Todd Lincoln’s practice of hosting seances. That wasn’t a crime, Geary says, but it was considered “scandalous that the first lady was into spiritualism and trying to talk to the dead.”
Adsit and Geary spend about 15 hours researching each episode. “We’re not journalists, but we do like to be as impartial as we can,” Geary says. “Crimestituents,” as they call their listeners, are welcome to suggest stories they’d like the podcasters to cover. They’ve had members of Congress on as guests: Adsit’s boss Carter sat down with the women to discuss the 1909 Savannah axe murders, and Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee joined them in early October to talk about the Knoxville torso murder.
Adsit and Geary do hope to step more into investigations eventually. “We’re not detectives and we don’t claim to be, but to us, investigative work means anything that can help the audience connect dots with new information and insights,” Adsit says.
